Meanwhile, Turning to F-35 News

Here's the week in news for the poor F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Harper-MacKay's  pride and joy, and what a week it's been.

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Nat Po's Michael Den Tandt has a telling assessment suggesting that the F-35 project is unravelling.

“It just seems like it’s slowly unravelling,” said an industry insider who specializes in aircraft procurement. “It’s a mess.”

 Peter MacKay has doggedly championed the Royal Canadian Air Force plan to purchase 65 “fifth-generation” Lockheed Martin Lightning stealth fighters to replace Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18s. Last week MacKay sought, with only limited success, to deflect reports that the first batch of planes built by Lockheed will be incapable of communicating in Canada’s far North.

...As other members of the international F-35 consortium — including Turkey, the Netherlands, Norway, Israel and Australia have either delayed or curtailed expectations of the number of planes they will buy, price estimates have skyrocketed. But even the latest figures are just educated guesses.

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Meanwhile the F-35's prime customer, the Pentagon, is launching a pricing war with Lockheed that, if the military prevails, could leave the manufacturer facing a loss on the airplane.

The Defense Department's push to change the terms of its next production contract for the F-35, or Joint Strike Fighter, could expose Lockheed to possible losses in coming years, said consultant Loren Thompson, who has close ties to the company.

"The government wants to radically change its approach to sharing risk on new weapons programs so that all of the exposure is shifted to industry," Thompson said.

Shay Assad, the Pentagon's director of defense pricing, told Reuters in a recent interview that he was braced for resistance from industry to some reforms. "We're going to be breaking some glass here," he said.

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Australian government officials, concerned that their F-35s won't be available in time, have sent a team to Lockheed to audit the whole F-35 programme.   The audit may lead Australia to defer its order.

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And even more happy tidings.    


...the Pentagon's weapons testing office is warning that pilot training in the new jets should be delayed for safety reasons.
 
Director of Operational Testing Michael Gilmore, Bloomberg News reports in its subscriber only BGOV news service (not available online at this point), warns that Air Force plans to begin pilot training in November risk a "serious mishap" due to unresolved safety issues.

Gilmore, in an Oct. 21 memo, said there are “serious concerns” with commencing initial training for F-35 pilots as early as November at Eglin Air Force Base.

Gilmore recommended a delay of as much as 10 months to fly the Lockheed Martin Corp. plane 1,500 more hours on top 1,000 already flown at Edwards Air Force Base,  by experienced test pilots.

The F-35 “has not yet met the prerequisites previously set for reducing” air-mission abort rates and “resolving other safety-related issues before initiating training,” Gilmore said in a four-page memo to the department’s top weapons buyer, Frank Kendall.

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Which may explain why the US Naval Air Station Pensacola, which was to have 29 F-35s by now, has received just four of the aircraft.   The F-35 development programme has the appearance of a dog and pony show, minus the pony.  It's what can happen, and usually does, when you give up the common sense approach of "fly before you buy."

...the F-35 program is five to six years behind schedule. The estimated cost to taxpayers has nearly doubled.

The military will not have combat-ready F-35s to replace 30-year-old warplanes until 2016, if then.
There are numerous reasons for the F-35 debacle, say longtime defense observers, and most of them were predictable: Pentagon officials and military officers cobble together unrealistic goals, timetables and budgets, and defense contractors sign on knowing that once a big program is launched, it's seldom canceled and the money keeps flowing.

"What's happened here is what happens with 90 percent of defense programs," said Tom Christie, retired Pentagon director of operational testing and a battle-scarred veteran of 40-plus years of internal Defense Department weapons-buying conflicts.

...Lockheed has found F-35 development "more challenging and complicated" than predicted, concedes Tom Burbage, executive vice president and general manager.

 ...It wasn't as if the Pentagon, the military and Lockheed couldn't have foreseen big problems.

In October 2001, just days before Pentagon officials were to announce the winner of the F-35 development contract, the watchdog General Accounting Office warned against proceeding with the program, then valued at $200 billion.

Much of the technology needed, the report said, had not yet been developed to the point that the program could be launched without a high risk of major problems, production delays and runaway cost increases.

The GAO and other government agencies had issued similar warnings at least two years earlier. Each time the Pentagon replied that it had the situation under control.

The Pentagon, as it has done historically, has responded to the problems by cutting orders for planes to save money to pay for fixes. That in turn is driving up the future cost per plane for the U.S. and its allies.

As the estimated price of the F-35 has risen, some of the U.S.' partner nations have scaled back their buying plans or are considering doing so. At this point, no partner nation has actually placed an order for production aircraft, although Canada and Australia have said they expect to within a year or two.
Britain, which was once expected to buy 150 F-35Bs, the costly and more complicated version being developed for the Marines, now plans to buy many fewer F-35Cs, the U.S. Navy version. That will drive up the cost of the Marines' version, if it ever gets built.

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The F-35 is a truly hi-tech fighter but one thing that high-tech always comes with is a serious shelf-life problem.  Hi-tech weaponry is inevitably expensive which usually means sacrificing quantity for quality.  You wind up with fewer of them in the expectation they'll actually be so much more effective that you'll come out ahead compared with the cheaper option.  The term used is "force multiplier."  But it's a big gamble that will turn into a loser eventually.

The history of man is full of high-tech weaponry.   When prehistoric man first figured out how to lash a sharp pointy stone to a sapling, turning a knife into a spear, that was pretty high-tech for its time.  Boiling leather to form it into armour was high-tech for its time.  Gunpowder, muskets, cannon, rifles, machine guns, artillery, heavier than air flight, tanks, rockets, jet engines, nuclear bombs - all were high-tech by turns.   Each was a huge force-multiplier but only for a while, only until rivals figured out how to counter them or copy them.

The F-35 is a mediocre fighter made invisible, sort of invisible.   Once it becomes detectable, however, you're left with a mediocre fighter and, because of its enormous costs, very few of them.  It should still work well enough against backward enemies lacking modern air defence systems but there are far more capable, far less expensive aircraft that can do that job even better.   The F-35 is designed to fight countries that can afford to deploy their own high-tech weaponry, countries that are already developing their own stealth aircraft and the sort of radar that does work quite well against the F-35.   And these potential adversaries know they've got at least five years, probably ten, before they would have to worry about defeating a force of F-35 fighters.

Worse yet, the F-35 is "high-tech brittle" unlike its big stealth brother, the F-22 Raptor.  If the Raptor's stealth advantage is negated it remains an incredibly effective fighter.  It's fast, agile, long-range, survivable and carries a substantial weapons load.   If you negate the F-35's stealth advantage it's far from fast, unmaneuverable,  short range and carries a very modest weapons load.  In air combat against any of the old Russian Sukhoi 30 series fighters, the F-35 would be dead meat.

So what assurance do we have, what manufacturer's warranty will we get, that the F-35's stealth technology will remain effective for ten, twenty or thirty years, the service life we expect from this aircraft?   Shouldn't we get some promise that the F-35 won't be old-tech target practice for at least a decade, maybe even two?

This thing is wrong at so many levels that one wonders what backroom deals keep driving it forward.